


in hopes that the glare will bring you around

by akisazame



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Mostly Canon Compliant, Post-Season/Series 02, canon-typical content warnings apply, coping mechanisms with various degrees of healthiness, with some liberties taken for Metaphorical Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 12:44:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18120986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akisazame/pseuds/akisazame
Summary: "Normal?" Valencia splutters, shoving the phone back into Heather's hand with a little more force than she intends. "Explain to me what exactly about this is normal.""I mean, it's not," Heather says, sliding her phone safely back under the strap of her bra. "Like, in the grand scheme, super not normal. But with Rebecca you kind of have to grade on a curve, you know?"(Valencia, post-2x13.)





	in hopes that the glare will bring you around

**Author's Note:**

> thanks as always to my husband, for beta reading this and telling me to my face that I'm bad. sorry that this isn't the r/v that you wanted.
> 
> title from "You Wouldn't Like Me" by Tegan and Sara.

In truth, there hadn't been much to plan about Rebecca and Josh's wedding, since Valencia had spent years laying the groundwork already, clipping photos out of bridal magazines and laying them out in her three ring binder for what she imagined would be her own use. Once her wedding became Rebecca's wedding, Valencia's involvement was simply putting those carefully laid plans into motion, which was really just another form of organization. There had been something heady and empowering about doing it, watching the way everything came together exactly how she'd always imagined it.

Right up until it didn't.

That first night, after the entire ceremony and reception are dismantled without being used, Valencia goes home to her apartment and tries to slow the still-rapid beating of her heart. She's never had trouble sleeping before, but now every time she closes her eyes to meditate she can only see Rebecca, the white of her dress vivid against the backdrop of the clear blue sky as she teeters on the edge of that rocky cliffside. Valencia's brain, unrelenting in its cruelty, builds on the scenario, and she imagines Rebecca actually jumping in high definition clarity, her body disappearing beneath the waves below, only to rewind and show it to her again and again and again. _They all leave! Everyone leaves!_ the phantom Rebecca screams in Valencia's mind, and then she's up, out of bed, pulling on her yoga pants and a cardigan and driving straight to Rebecca's.

She lets herself in with her own key, which Rebecca had pressed into her hand a week and a half ago, when Valencia had been spending all of her free time at Rebecca's place reviewing floral arrangements and choosing ribbon colors and making sure no one on the guest list had any food allergies. _It's practical,_ Rebecca had said, businesslike, but then her lawyer facade had cracked and she'd grinned. _Besides,_ she'd added, pink dusting her cheeks beneath the freckles, _you're like an honorary roommate anyway._ Now, post-disaster, the house is silent and all the lights are off except two: the porch light and one on the table beside the couch, which glows like a beacon in the night. The door to Rebecca's room is closed; Heather's is ajar, but there's nothing but darkness on the other side.

Valencia goes to Rebecca's door first. Stops. Stares at it.

"Heyyyy," comes Heather's voice from behind Valencia's back, and she jumps and whirls, startled, hand to her throat. "Couldn't sleep? Me either. It's a real epidemic."

"I just," Valencia starts, then trails off, not sure how to explain herself. She rubs her hand on her breastbone, as though that can soothe the pace of her heart. "I was..."

"Yeah, I get it," Heather says, to Valencia's immense relief. She nods towards the closed door. "She hasn't come out since Paula left."

There's a lump in Valencia's throat when she thinks about Heather and Paula bundling Rebecca into Paula's minivan, driving Rebecca home, being there for Rebecca in her grief and rage. It wasn't that Valencia didn't care about Rebecca's wellbeing — she did, of course, but had other things to manage in the aftermath — but now she's worried about how it came off. Worried that Rebecca is mad at her now, too. She lifts her hand to Rebecca's doorknob but doesn't touch it, like she's afraid of a static shock.

"She's probably sleeping," Heather says. Valencia isn't sure if it's meant to be an encouragement or a deterrent. "There was a lot of crying. Whole box of tissues just like, decimated. But we buy in bulk, so."

Valencia imagines opening the door and finding Rebecca in bed, curled in on herself, hugging that big dumb alligator plush to her chest, and she can't help but think about how she'd felt after she'd broken up with Josh at Jayma's wedding, and the way the bed they'd shared had felt too large and too small all at once. Then, inexplicably, she imagines crawling into Rebecca's bed, under her covers, tucking herself in behind Rebecca's small frame and holding her close while she sleeps.

She takes two quick steps back and bumps into Heather, who makes a small noise but doesn't seem annoyed or surprised. "It's okay if you wanna stay over," she says instead, making a vague motion in the direction of the couch. "There's pillows and stuff. Blankets. All the sleep things. Or, like, insomnia things. Tylerin. Sleepytime tea."

"Thanks." Valencia forces a smile on her face and isn't too surprised when Heather doesn't mirror it. It's been a rough day for everyone, and Heather's never been the type to fake her emotions.

If she's honest, being here doesn't feel much better than being at her own place; she's not sure what she expected, but it wasn't the oppressive negative energy that she's found. Heather retrieves a pillow and blanket from the linen closet and hands them wordlessly to Valencia before disappearing into her room again, and Valencia just stands there clutching both items for a truly stupendous amount of time, trying to decide what to do with herself. She's exhausted and wrung out but feels rooted to the spot, tethered to the space outside Rebecca's door by an invisible string. She considers dropping the pillow on the floor and just sitting there, but that would not only be pathetic but would result in a cocktail of body aches which she would then have to spend hours working out of her system.

She finally manages to drag herself away and set up a semblance of camp on the couch, curled into a corner, feet tucked under the blanket and knees pulled up to her chest with the pillow nestled in between. It's not a sleeping position, but when she tries to lie down instead she feels dizzy and nauseous either despite or because of the fact that she barely had time to eat all day. There are scraps of leftover white ribbon on the coffee table, and Valencia fixates on them, trying to remember where they came from, why they were trimmed away, where she could've put them instead. As though they were the missing pieces that would've made this day turn out right.

Valencia has no recollection of falling asleep, but she wakes to sunlight peeking through the front window. Someone must've come out at some point, because her blanket has been unfolded and draped messily over her. She's only disoriented for a few seconds before she remembers where she is, why she's there, and that yesterday wasn't a dream or a nightmare, and she scrambles to her feet and dashes across the room to find that Rebecca's door is open.

Rebecca's wedding dress is lying atop her unmade bed, an angry torn gash along the line of the zipper, beads ripped free and scattered like tiny snowflakes. There are angry smears of red lipstick drawn across the surface of Rebecca's mirror, blotting out the reflected image. The closet door is wide open, and half the drawers of the dresser are pulled out, haphazard, like the scene of a robbery. Rebecca was here, once, but not anymore.

Valencia rushes back out into the living room, convinced she'd somehow missed Rebecca's presence there, even though that seems impossible with the way that Rebecca's effervescent aura expands to fill every space she occupies. She's on the edge of either panicking or slipping into despair, but then she starts zeroing in on the details. Rebecca's car keys are gone. A pair of Rebecca's shoes are gone. Rebecca's car is gone. Rebecca is gone.

"She texted." Valencia turns to see Heather standing in her own now-open bedroom doorway, holding up her phone screen-side out. "To the group chat. It's only like, mildly alarming. A normal amount of alarming, for her."

It's faster to look at Heather's phone than to go digging through her own purse, so Valencia closes the gap between them and plucks the phone out of Heather's hand. _I need to be alone for a while,_ Rebecca's message reads, with several worried replies from Paula immediately after, disappearing past the edge. Valencia thumbs the screen but there are no further messages from Rebecca, just more from Paula and one from Heather, so she scrolls back up to Rebecca's and feels something icy solidify in the pit of her stomach.

"Normal?" Valencia splutters, shoving the phone back into Heather's hand with a little more force than she intends. "Explain to me what exactly about this is normal."

"I mean, it's not," Heather says, sliding her phone safely back under the strap of her bra. "Like, in the grand scheme, super not normal. But with Rebecca you kind of have to grade on a curve, you know?"

Valencia narrows her eyes at Heather, then sidesteps into the bathroom to run her fingers through her hair before marching back out into the living room and retrieving her purse from the floor. She's at the front door and toeing her shoes back on before she feels Heather's presence looming near her elbow.

"Uh, bye, I guess?"

"I'm going to look for her," Valencia snaps. She digs her keys and sunglasses out of her purse; it's almost a relief to put the glasses on, masking the dark circles under her eyes and the redness in her sclera. "Obviously."

"Pretty sure that's the exact opposite of what she wants us to do, dude," Heather says, snatching the keys from Valencia's hand before Valencia even realizes what's happening. Valencia reaches for them, annoyed, but Heather uses her superior height to her advantage and dangles them over Valencia's head. "Nope. No way. Homegirl wants space, homegirl gets space. Would you really want people all up in your business if you just got stood up at the altar so your guy could go on a big date with Jesus or whatever?"

Valencia's only point of comparison is, ironically, her break-up with the exact guy in question, though the circumstances had obviously been different. Even so, she'd done a lot of wallowing in the weeks immediately after, spending all of her time outside of work holed up in the apartment that used to be theirs and gorging herself on foods she could barely taste beneath all the sodium and artificial flavors. But then Rebecca had come gusting in with her Santa Ana winds personality and carried Valencia out into the desert against her will, and while Valencia had been nothing but resistant at first, she knows now that going to Electric Mesa with Rebecca had been good for her. It had been good for both of them, really. Doesn't she owe it to Rebecca, now that their positions are reversed?

She lets out a calming breath, because getting riled up about it isn't going to help anything, and drops back down from standing on her tiptoes. "But I can't just... not do anything."

Heather twirls Valencia's keys around her finger, then tosses them in the air and catches them. "Lucky for you, I've got tons of practice doing nothing. Wanna help me dig into my Netflix queue?"

She doesn't. Valencia can't think of anything worse than sitting still and pretending that nothing has happened. Today is fundamentally different from yesterday and they should be acting like it, instead of deliberately ignoring the Rebecca-shaped hole in their lives. She deploys her most judgmental eyebrow arch and holds out her hand, palm up. "Give me my keys."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Heather says acerbically, "did I give you the impression this was an optional activity? My bad. Yeah, you're gonna sit here with me while I binge watch like, all of Black Mirror and drink mimosas with that fancy champagne we didn't get to use yesterday."

"All that champagne went back with the caterer," Valencia says. She personally counted every box as it went back into the van.

Heather snorts, and it's the closest thing Valencia has heard to a laugh in the past 24 hours. "Yeah, no, I deffo swiped a bottle on our way out. I'd say that's more than fair, considering the non-refundable deposit. Oh yeah," Heather goes on, barreling right through the objection Valencia was about to raise, "I saw your expenses spreadsheet. You only had it open on your laptop like, a hundred percent of the time you were over here. I have some self-interest where Rebecca's finances are involved. You know, with the whole rent-paying and stuff."

Valencia wants to keep arguing, wants to push and push and push until Heather finally gives in and relinquishes Valencia's keys, but there's an annoying little voice in the back of her mind that insists that Heather is right, and the worst part is that the little voice sounds just like Rebecca. _I want to be left alone and I'm fine,_ the voice says, Valencia's own words echoed back in Rebecca's pitch, and now Valencia understands why Rebecca had been so relentless. _You're not fine! You're sad like me!_

It's not that Valencia didn't have emotions before. It's just that Rebecca wears all of hers on the outside, tattooed across her skin, and maybe some of that has rubbed off on Valencia. Unfortunately.

"Fine," she says, crossing her arms and making it very clear that she is not happy about this, despite her assent. "But only because I want to be here when Rebecca comes back."

Rebecca doesn't come back.

-

She doesn't come back the next day either.

-

There's a limit to how much clothes sharing is acceptable between friends, but Valencia keeps borrowing from Heather's closet because going home to pack a bag would mean acknowledging that none of them have any idea when Rebecca will finally come home. Heather's things fit Valencia well enough, which is fortunate because they've both been avoiding Rebecca's room by unspoken truce. They keep her door ajar, and sometimes Valencia catches herself peering inside as she passes on her way to the bathroom, as though she might discover that Rebecca snuck her way back in while no one was looking. It's a ludicrous thought, she knows, because despite all her schemes and covert ops, Rebecca has never successfully snuck anywhere in her life. Rebecca is a firework: loud, brazen, colorful, her fiery particles singeing anything they touch.

Valencia considers the merits of leaving the house on the third day after the unspeakable event; she's scheduled to teach two yoga classes in the afternoon, with a long enough gap in between that she could go back to her own apartment and retrieve some clothes that don't smell like Mountain Spring or Sunlit Garden or whatever nonsense artificial fragrance is in Rebecca and Heather's laundry detergent. Instead she cancels both classes in favor of sitting at Rebecca and Heather's kitchen table, despondently picking apart a blueberry muffin with her fingers while she stares at the group text as though she can will Rebecca's name to appear with the typing notification beneath it.

At some point Heather emerges from the bathroom, dressed in something other than pajamas for the first time in three days and with her hair pulled into a colorful-extensions-free ponytail, and approaches the kitchen table to grab her messenger bag from the back of a chair. "So, I have class."

"What?" Valencia says, letting the crumbly bits of muffin drop back onto her plate and not bothering to school her expression into something that isn't open-mouthed gaping at Heather.

"Yeah, leaving the house is a thing I used to do? I don't love it, really. But, like, I'm paying for the privilege of higher education, so." She reaches over to pluck one of the larger chunks of muffin from Valencia's plate and pops it into her mouth, then turns to head for the door.

"You can't _leave,_ " Valencia blurts out, her voice squeaking on the last syllable. Phantom Rebecca is back in her head, yelling _everyone leaves!_ in a strangled, anguished voice, and Valencia winces, reaching for the well of inner calm that she knows, objectively, she should be able to access.

"Uh, pretty sure we're not under house arrest," Heather says, half-turning back towards Valencia but still unmistakably angled towards the door. "I mean, I guess I can see how you'd get that impression, what with my blatant pilfering of your car keys the other day, but there's been an update to our situation, in that there have been no updates, so I'm gonna take off for a bit and learn about fish." She starts to turn and go, but then glances back, the lines of her face softening in sympathy. "We're not helping anything by being hermits, V."

Valencia bites her lip and looks down at the ruins of the muffin on her plate. "Yeah. I know."

"So just like, do something normal," Heather says with a shrug. "Whatever that means for you. But I gotta bounce to do my normal thing, so enjoy your carbs."

It's not that Valencia feels uncomfortable in Rebecca and Heather's house by herself — she's been here by herself before, working on gift baskets or flower arrangements or some other menial task while Rebecca and Heather were otherwise occupied — but now there's a strange weight to it that wasn't there before. She briefly entertains the notion of also leaving, but without her yoga classes she doesn't know what she would even do. Besides, there's always the off-chance that Rebecca might finally come home, and the idea of her walking into an empty house, still littered with the detritus of her failed wedding, is completely unbearable.

So Valencia gets up, dumps her uneaten muffin pieces down the garbage disposal, and retrieves a trash bag from under the kitchen sink.

She starts with the bits of ribbon that had been on the coffee table, which Heather had haphazardly swept onto the floor to make room for popcorn and takeout chinese food during their Black Mirror binge session. It seems like there's trash everywhere, scraps of paper and ribbon and lace peppering the floor and scattered under all the furniture, so Valencia finds a broom in a closet and sweeps everything into her trash bag. She throws out the pile of bridesmaid bouquets, the groomsman corsages, Madison's little wicker basket of flower petals. There's somehow still garbage left over from all the crap Rebecca bought when she was trying to DIY it alone and Valencia throws all of that out too, twigs and twine and tulle bundled into bags and dumped into the garbage bin behind the house. 

There's a stack of cards on the kitchen counter, mostly addressed to 'Rebecca and Josh,' but a few are made out to 'The Happy Couple' or "Mr and Mrs Chan' and Valencia can't abide that, so she snatches a knife from the block and viciously tears into each envelope, checking the contents and sorting them into piles. She doesn't know what to do with the ones containing cash or checks or some other form of monetary gift, but she throws the rest into her trash bag without reading them. Inapplicable platitudes are just another thing that Rebecca shouldn't have to deal with. She also doesn't know what to do with the pile of actual gifts stacked in the corner; surely there's some kind of protocol for accepting or rejecting gifts for weddings that don't actually happen, but Valencia hadn't thought she'd ever need that knowledge. For so long, she and Josh had been a guarantee, and a part of her wishes she could have transferred that guarantee over to Rebecca along with everything else. She takes the stack of cards and the pile of gifts, puts them all in a large cardboard box, and stashes them in the trunk of her car to be dealt with later. If she has to personally mail all these gifts back herself, so be it.

Now that she's in motion after days of inaction, she finds it hard to stop. She's removed all traces of the wedding from the common areas of the house but now she feels compelled to clean it too, as though she can wash away every bad thing that's happened in the past week with Lysol wipes and Swiffer dusters. It's not so different from planning the wedding, except backwards, reverse engineering everything until she can almost believe it never existed.

She's mopping the kitchen floor when the front door opens, and the sound of it makes Valencia freeze, heart in her throat, because she's absolutely dead certain that finally, finally, she's going to look up and see Rebecca there. But instead she's greeted by Heather's incredulous face, gaping at her from the doorway.

"Okay, cool," Heather says, drawing out the syllables like she needs to stall for time while she unravels the puzzle of what's happened in her house while she's been gone. "When I said do something normal I was thinking like, incense and lotus pose, but I'm not looking this gift horse in the mouth. We're, like, not big cleaners around here, so. Thanks?"

Valencia scoffs, mentally sweeping away her disappointment just like everything else she's swept away today. "It was bothering me," she says by way of explanation.

"Yeah, but you like, went for it," Heather says. She reaches up and runs her finger along the top of the mirror next to the door, then holds it up to display the lack of transferred dust. "Very thorough."

Even as the pride blossoms in Valencia's chest, there's a tendril of displeasure snaking its way around her heart. The truth is that she didn't do any of this for Heather, just like she didn't plan Rebecca's wedding as some kind of tribute to the institution of weddings. Valencia's lived her entire life putting herself first, and she can't quite track down when exactly that changed, but she's very aware of who changed it. It's ironic how she selfishly wants that person to be here now, to see everything that Valencia's done for her and know that despite everything that's happened, she's not alone.

"Well," she says, trying for nonchalant and not certain she's landing it, "I've been practically living here, and I have standards to uphold."

Heather wrinkles her nose. "Okay, but you know throwing all that stuff in the trash doesn't like, erase all the shit that happened, right?"

"Don't be reductive," Valencia says, using a word that Rebecca taught her, as though adopting her Harvard-and-Yale vocabulary will mask how thoroughly she's been called out. "Your house was a disaster, so I tidied up. No one likes a mess."

The edge of Heather's mouth turns up, just a little. "Pretty sure that liking a mess is why we're both here, dude."

-

One week after the non-wedding, Valencia gets in her car and starts driving.

She's been surreptitiously checking all of Rebecca's usual haunts any time she leaves the house, hitting up Cup of Boba and Home Base before driving up and down East Cameron in the most roundabout route she's ever taken to the yoga studio, but reclassifying the duration of Rebecca's disappearance from number of days to number of weeks has made Valencia feel desperate. She pulls onto the eastbound ramp to the 10 freeway without a clear sense of her destination, only that she needs to go somewhere.

Ten minutes pass before the silence becomes too unbearable, and Valencia starts scrolling through playlists on her phone until she lands on one she's neglected to listen to before now. _Oh, you sweet summer child,_ she remembers Rebecca saying, hand pressed to her heart and eyes glassy with unshed crocodile tears, after Valencia had admitted to not understanding any of Rebecca's offhand musical theater references, _I have so much to teach you._ Three days later she'd shown up at Valencia's apartment clutching a CD jewel case with "Musical Theater 101, as taught by Rebecca Bunch, Esq" scrawled across the plastic in bright pink Sharpie. Rebecca had been immediately and deeply scandalized by the fact that Valencia didn't own any devices capable of playing a CD, and Valencia had rolled her eyes and handed over her phone long enough for Rebecca to build a Spotify playlist instead. Even though Rebecca had wanted to listen to it right away, Valencia hadn't had time before her next yoga class, and their promises to make time for it later fell by the wayside when Rebecca and Josh abruptly started dating again. But the betrayal she'd felt then is insignificant in the face of what happened last week, and even if Valencia has no idea where Rebecca is, she can at least fill the silence with something Rebecca made.

She presses play and the car floods with exactly the sort of cheesy effervescent nonsense that Valencia expected from her extremely limited exposure to musicals, but the chorus of girls singing about washing a man out of their hair makes half of a laugh bubble up in her throat. She can almost imagine the sort of delighted look Rebecca must've had on her face when she chose this song, still filled with vindictive fire after their thorough dismantling of Josh at Electric Mesa. She expects the whole playlist to be like this, nerdy and a little embarrassing and so very Rebecca, but the next song shifts genres entirely to 60s hippie rock. This reminds Valencia of Electric Mesa too, but in a softer, more ephemeral way, and she finds herself humming along as she takes the interchange to the 15.

The next song is an emotional ballad, followed by a more uptempo number, followed by a song partly in Spanish. They're all sung by women, Valencia realizes, which shouldn't surprise her considering the source, and even though most of these songs decidedly would not pass the Bechdel test Valencia starts to get a sense of the message Rebecca was trying to convey. She drives through the Cajon Pass and listens to these women singing about what they did for love and trees full of starlight and how something's bound to begin, and she wishes Rebecca were sitting beside her, laughing delightedly at Valencia's unguarded scoff when the next song is all about clothes.

It's beyond stupid to keep pretending that she's chosen her destination arbitrarily, like she hasn't known all along that she's been retracing the route Rebecca took when she absconded with Valencia into the desert. Now that Valencia's started imagining Rebecca's presence in passenger seat, she finds that she can't stop; she can so clearly imagine Rebecca's voice shouting _I'm so much better than before!_ along with the music, not matching even a single note and somehow all the more endearing for it. The last time she'd travelled this route in this direction, Valencia had been silent and sullen in the passenger seat while Rebecca talked her ear off. The Valencia of then would be unable to reconcile the Valencia of now, who misses Rebecca so much that it manifests as a physical ache. Honestly, even the Valencia of three weeks ago wouldn't have been able to reconcile it.

The song that plays as Valencia takes the off ramp towards the site of Electric Mesa is a duet between two women, singing about how they've been forever changed by knowing each other. It's so blatant, Valencia thinks. So obvious. Rebecca keeps her heart on the outside of her body, close at hand, so she can offer it up in its entirety to anyone who so much as hints they might want it. She doesn't know why she thought Rebecca would have approached the act of making this dumb musical theater playlist in any other way.

There's nothing at the Electric Mesa site right now, so Valencia pulls her car off the road and shifts it into park. The desert expands for miles in front of her, empty and desolate, the sun so bright it's almost blinding even through her sunglasses. The playlist has shuffled back to the beginning, the tone dissonant with the oppressive mood that's settled over Valencia's heart like a weighted blanket, but she can't bring herself to change it or turn it off. Instead she rests both arms on the top of her steering wheel and leans forward, closing her eyes and letting the music of Rebecca's world flood into her soul.

She's an idiot, she realizes, because for some reason she thought that Rebecca would actually be here in the middle of the desert. She really thought she'd pull up to the site of Electric Mesa and find Rebecca's Hyundai parked between two cacti, left behind so that Rebecca could disappear into the wilderness to do Wild or something. Or maybe she thought she'd find Rebecca's tent here too, with Rebecca inside it, trying to recapture the feeling of not giving even one single fuck about Josh Chan. Instead there's only this endless expanse of dirt and shrubs and rocks and nothing, nothing, nothing.

She stays long enough that the playlist loops for a second time, then a third. She doesn't think about the reason she's waiting, as though the simple act of thinking her name will snuff the possibility out of existence.

After the fourth time the playlist loops, she shuts it off and drives home in silence.

-

It's the last room she hasn't touched.

It should've been the first, Valencia thinks now as she stands in the doorway of Rebecca's room, empty trash bag in hand. It makes her feel sick to believe she was content with the idea that Rebecca would come home to find the literal tatters of her fairytale wedding strewn across her bedroom like seaweed washed to shore. At the same time, it feels like a violation to trespass into Rebecca's space when she's absent and erase the physical evidence of her righteous fury in the face of Josh's betrayal. Valencia could make an argument either way, and she feels the twin impulses pulling her in opposite directions and ultimately leaving her immobile.

Valencia has never liked it when people aren't able to make up their minds, and she especially doesn't like it when it's coming from herself.

She starts with tidying the dresser, refolding errant articles of clothing and pushing all the drawers back into place. She spirals outward from there, picking up laundry from the floor and tossing it into the hamper, straightening a stack of books on the bedside table, making a pyramid of stuffed animals in the corner. There's a trash can next to the bed that she empties into her bag without looking at the contents. Soon there's nearly a halo of cleanliness around the perimeter of the room, leaving only the angry scrawl on the mirror and the tattered mess on the bed, both of which Valencia can barely bring herself to look at, let alone touch.

She's being stupid, she tells herself as she sinks to the floor next to Rebecca's dumb alligator plush. Rebecca doesn't want to see any of this. Maybe it's the whole reason she left. Maybe it's the reason she hasn't wanted to come home. It's logical, surely, to want to sand down the harsh edges of Rebecca's cracked and broken life, to protect her from the splinters of what she's left behind. She's doing Rebecca a favor. It's kindness. It's friendship.

And the desire that's bubbling up in her chest to wrap Rebecca in a protective cocoon, to keep anything or anyone from breaking her heart ever again... that's just friendship, too. That's what friendship means. It has to be.

She's being stupid.

The lipstick gets Windexed off the mirror. The damaged dress goes into the trash bag, along with the beads she sweeps off the bedspread. She puts the bag in the trunk of her car with the box of gifts, because beautiful things deserve to be salvaged and mended.

She makes the bed and puts the dumb alligator plush on top.

Valencia goes home, and she hopes Rebecca will too.

-

(She does. Eventually.)

**Author's Note:**

> [Musical Theater 101, as taught by Rebecca Bunch, Esq.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5B8gfItQ2Byk3WbwjZxTSv) is indeed available on Spotify


End file.
